I. Teaching
Every graduate student is required to complete a minimum of one full-time, semester-long Teaching Assistantship (TA) at some time during her/his graduate training. A student with previous teaching experience may petition the Graduate Committee for exemption from part or all of this requirement. Teaching assignments are made each semester by the Director of Graduate Studies and/or Graduate Committee.

II. Departmental TA Certification
Since teaching assignments represent an important component of the department's academic mission, students who accept teaching assistantships also accept the responsibility of completing these assignments satisfactorily. In order to ensure that new teaching assistants are adequately prepared/qualified to carry out their teaching assignments, potentially three different forms of presentation criteria will be used. First, the TA candidate's performance in the first-year Introduction to Research will be reviewed. Second, each spring the department will offer a teaching workshop, followed by individual evaluations, for graduate students who are scheduled to teach for the first time during the following academic year. Finally, students for whom English is not their primary language will participate in the University's English language testing/training program. Students must receive satisfactory evaluations from these performance standards to qualify for subsequent teaching assistantship support. Similarly, students must perform satisfactorily (as judged from course evaluations and reports from supervisory faculty) in order to be eligible for continued teaching assistantship support.